U.S. Court of Appeals Rules Against Lorenzo Johnson’sNew Legal Challenge to His Frame-up Conviction!Demand the PA Attorney General Dismiss the Charges!Free Lorenzo Johnson, Now!

The
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied Lorenzo Johnson’s
motion to file a Second Habeas Corpus Petition. The order contained the
outrageous declaration that Johnson hadn’t made a “prima facie case”
that he had new evidence of his innocence. This not only puts a legal
obstacle in Johnson’s path as his fight for freedom makes its way
(again) through the state and federal courts—but it undermines the newly
filed Pennsylvania state appeal that is pending in the Court of Common
Pleas.

Stripped of “legalese,” the court’s October 15, 2013
order says Johnson’s new evidence was not brought into court soon
enough—although it was the prosecution and police who withheld evidence
and coerced witnesses into lying or not coming forward with the truth!
This, despite over fifteen years and rounds of legal battles to uncover
the evidence of government misconduct. This is a set-back for Lorenzo
Johnson’s renewed fight for his freedom, but Johnson is even more
determined as his PA state court appeal continues.

Increased
public support and protest is needed. The fight for Lorenzo Johnson’s
freedom is not only a fight for this courageous man and family. The
fight for Lorenzo Johnson is also a fight for all the innocent others
who have been framed and are sitting in the slow death of prison. The PA
Attorney General is directly pursuing the charges against Lorenzo,
despite the evidence of his innocence and the corruption of the police.
Free Lorenzo Johnson, Now!

—Rachel Wolkenstein, Esq.
October 25, 2013

For more on the federal court and PA state court legal filings.
Hear Mumia’s latest commentary, “Cat Cries”
Go to: www.FreeLorenzoJohnson.org for more information, to sign the petition, and how to help.

Two important weeks to support the Iraq War whistleblower

Three
years ago, in October of 2010, WikiLeaks shocked the world when it
published the “Iraq War Logs,” a comprehensive database which contained
thousands of records detailing abuse and corruption during the war in
Iraq. These documents were revealed by Chelsea Manning, who has been
sentenced to 35 years at a Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, prison. The
documents that Chelsea Manning revealed via WikiLeaks uncovered crimes
that were committed by both the Iraqi government and the U.S. military
with the knowledge of top Pentagon officials.

They describe how
thousands of innocent Iraqis were targeted for their religious or
political beliefs, then detained and tortured in prisons operated by the
Iraqi government. These same documents reveal acts in which U.S.
soldiers abused and killed Iraqi civilians, and have yet to be held
accountable. The documents even revealed to the public how U.S. forces
helped teach the Iraqi military interrogation methods that have been
banned by the UN as torture.

For the sake of the millions of
civilians and the thousands of soldiers who have suffered in this
unnecessary war, we ask that you remember the date that the public
gained access to this information and take action to support Chelsea and
her goal of bringing transparency to government. You can do this by
contributing a letter to the official application for clemency that is
being sent to Convening Authority Major General Jeffrey S. Buchanan. He
is one of two people with the power to free Private Manning now, along
with President Obama. There is precedent for convening authorities to
reduce or eliminate the sentences of soldiers in cases where they have
been convinced that the court martial did not deliver justice.

Given
the numerous injustices in Private Manning’s case, we believe that
Major General Buchanan should demonstrate leniency: Manning was
imprisoned for three years before trial (including one year of solitary
confinement); motives of conscience were not considered as an important
factor by the judge; shockingly, the prosecution was even allowed to
change their charge sheet after presenting their case.

Please follow these guidelines to write a letter. If you have already done so, please encourage at least three of your friends to do the same.

For those looking to take further action, we encourage you to organize a letter-writing party, which you can register on the Events Section of our website. All letters should be scanned electronically and PDF versions should be sent to nathan@bradleymanning.org by November 1.

As
we remember the tragedy of the Iraq War, in many ways made clearer by
the release of the war logs themselves, we must seize this opportunity
to show support for PVT Manning and her work to bring much-needed
transparency to international relations. Only through working together
with adequate information can people of the world prevent history from
repeating.

Thank you for your support.

Help us continue to cover 100% of Pvt. Manning's legal fees! Donate today.

Free Lynne Stewart: Support Compassionate Release

Renowned defense
attorney Lynne Stewart, unjustly charged and convicted for the “crime”
of providing her client with a fearless defense, is dying of cancer
while imprisoned in the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, Texas.

Your action now can lead to her freedom so that she
may live out her remaining days with the comfort and joy of her family
and those closest to her, including her devoted husband Ralph Poynter,
many children, grandchildren, a great grandchild and lifelong friends.

The conservative medical prognosis by the
oncologist contracted by the prison is that Lynne Stewart has but
16-months to live. Breast cancer, in remission prior to her
imprisonment, reached Stage Four more than a year ago, emerging in her
lymph nodes, shoulder, bones and lungs.

Despite repeated courses of chemotherapy, cancer
advances in her lungs, resistant to treatment. Compounding her dire
condition, Lynne Stewart’s white blood cell count dropped so low that
she has been isolated in a prison hospital room since April 2013 to
reduce risk of generalized infection.

Under the 1984 Sentencing Act, upon a prisoner’s
request, the Bureau of Prisons can file a motion with the Court to
reduce sentences “for extraordinary and compelling reasons,” life
threatening illness foremost among these.

Lynne Stewart’s recent re-application for
compassionate release meets all the criteria specified in guidelines
issued by the Bureau of Prisons in August 2013.

These “new guidelines” followed a searing report
and testimony before Congress by the Department of Justice’s Inspector
General Michael Horowitz. His findings corroborated a definitive report
by Human Rights Watch. Inspector General Horowitz excoriated the Federal
Bureau of Prisons for the restrictive crippling of the compassionate
release program. In a 20-year period, the Bureau had released a scant
492 persons – an average of 24 a year out of a population that exceeds
220,000.

Over 30,000 people of conscience from all walks of
life in the United States and internationally took action to free Lynne
Stewart following her first application for compassionate release in
April of this year.

Among those who raised their voices are former
Attorney General Ramsey Clark – who was co-counsel in the case that led
to Lynne Stewart’s imprisonment, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former
President of the United Nations General Assembly, Father Miguel D’Escoto
Brockmann, Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Ed Asner,
Daniel Berrigan, Liz McAllister Berrigan, Richard Falk, Daniel Ellsberg,
Noam Chomsky, Cornell West, Dick Gregory, Alice Walker and Bianca
Jagger.

They along with thousands of individuals and
organizations, such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, the
National Lawyers Guild and Lawyers Rights Watch Canada, directed
letters, phone calls and public declarations to the Federal Bureau of
Prisons Director Charles E. Samuels, Jr. and to Attorney General Eric H.
Holder, Jr.

Dick Gregory has refused all solid food since April
4 and his remarkable moral witness will not end until Lynne Stewart is
released.

We call upon all to amplify this outpouring of
support. We ask all within our reach to convey to Bureau of Prisons
Director Samuels his obligation to approve Lynne Stewart’s application
and instruct the federal attorney to file the requisite motion for Lynne
Stewart’s compassionate release.

Please sign this new petition and
reach out to others to sign. The letter below will be sent on your
behalf via email to Charles E. Samuels, Jr., Director of the Federal
Bureau of Prisons and to Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. Telephone
calls also can be made to the Bureau of Prisons:

6) Clemency for Snowden? U.S. Officials Say No
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
November 3, 2013http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/clemency-for-snowden-u-s-officials-say-no/?ref=us
7) Lawyers Challenge Detention of Greenwald’s Partner in London
By
STEVEN ERLANGER

BERLIN — Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive American security contractor
granted temporary asylum by Russia, has appealed to Washington to stop
treating him like a traitor for revealing that the United States has been eavesdropping on its allies, a German politician who met with Mr. Snowden said on Friday.

Mr. Snowden made his appeal in a letter
that was carried to Berlin by Hans-Christian Ströbele, a veteran member
of the Green Party in the German Parliament. Mr. Ströbele said he and
two journalists for German news outlets met with Mr. Snowden
and a person described as his assistant — probably his British aide,
Sarah Harrison — at an undisclosed location in or near Moscow on
Thursday for almost three hours.

Mr. Ströbele had gone to
Moscow to explore whether Mr. Snowden could or would testify before a
planned parliamentary inquiry into the eavesdropping. Any arrangements
for Mr. Snowden to testify would require significant legal maneuvering,
as it seemed unlikely that he would travel to Germany for fear of
extradition to the United States.

In his letter, Mr. Snowden,
30, also appealed for clemency. He said his disclosures about American
intelligence activity at home and abroad, which he called “systematic
violations of law by my government that created a moral duty to act,”
have had positive effects.

Yet “my government continues to
treat dissent as defection, and seeks to criminalize political speech
with felony charges that provide no defense,” Mr. Snowden wrote.
“However, speaking the truth is not a crime. I am confident that with
the support of the international community, the government of the United
States will abandon this harmful behavior.”

Mr. Ströbele, 74,
is a seasoned left-wing defense lawyer and the longest-serving member of
the parliamentary committee that oversees German intelligence. At a
packed news conference after his return to Berlin, he said he was
contacted about going to Moscow late last week after the German
government said Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone might have been
tapped by American intelligence agents. He declined to elaborate, but
said he has had no dealings with the Russian authorities or the German
Embassy in Moscow.

He deftly parried requests to reveal more,
while appealing to the governments and citizens of Germany, France and
the United States to stop treating Mr. Snowden as a criminal.

Instead, Mr. Ströbele said, echoing an opinion gaining support here, Germany should thank Mr. Snowden. After ARD,
the premier German television network, reported on Thursday night about
the Moscow visit, it broadcast a commentary arguing that Germany should
show gratitude for his exposure of United States intelligence
practices.

Mr. Ströbele said he had found Mr. Snowden lucid and
well informed. He said he had been told that Mr. Snowden was allowed to
go shopping, but Mr. Ströbele declined to reveal any other details
about Mr. Snowden’s routine.

News about the visit to Moscow
eclipsed a number of interviews given on Thursday by the American
ambassador, John B. Emerson, who tried to assuage German fears that the
United States Embassy in Berlin was the center for monitoring Ms. Merkel
and other well-placed Germans.

Ms. Merkel, while palpably angry in appearances last week, has made no
direct statements since, quietly sending two senior advisers to
Washington this week to begin re-establishing the trust she said had
been breached.

Mr. Ströbele’s news conference yielded moments
of humor as well. At one point, his cellphone rang. He pulled it out,
looked at it and asked cheerfully, “Does anybody know the chancellor’s
number?” Asked to speculate about which intelligence services might have
monitored his trip to Moscow, he said with a smile, “I assume that they
are all interested.”

SAN FRANCISCO — The middle stretch of Market Street here has befuddled mayors, investors and entrepreneurs for decades.

Studded with check-cashing joints, strip clubs and dollar stores, the
seven-block strip known as the Mid-Market had resisted cleanup efforts
and resolutely remained the same: a seedy place to visit day or night.
Even the area’s community groups said they were fearful.

Mid-Market is home to some of the highest vacancy rates in the city for
office or retail, despite its proximity to City Hall, which is a few
blocks away.

So it seemed implausible that a young company,
heralded as one of the technology industry’s next big things, would want
to make its headquarters in Mid-Market. But in April 2011, that young
company, Twitter, dispelled rumors that it was leaving San Francisco for
a nearby city suburb and instead announced it was relocating to
Mid-Market. In June 2012, it moved in.

Twitter leased space
from Shorenstein Properties, a real estate firm based in San Francisco,
known for its blue-chip office towers in the Financial District here.
Shorenstein bought an 11-story building in 2011 fronting Mid-Market that
had been vacant for five years. For them, it made sense to buy the
undervalued Art Deco landmark built in 1937, which had some of the most
spacious floor plans in the city at a time when office space was tight.
Twitter signed a lease until 2021 for 295,000 square feet in the
building and could expand that as its work force grows. “In our gut, we
believed if we changed it, they would come. We thought it would be a
real catalyst for the neighborhood,” said Charles W. Malet, chief
investment officer for Shorenstein Properties.

Now 15 other
companies, like Spotify, Square and Yammer, emboldened by Twitter’s move
and a city tax incentive that largely exempts them from city payroll
taxes if they relocate to the Mid-Market, have committed to take 1.3
million square feet in the area, which the city has renamed Central
Market. Apartment towers with 5,500 units are in the works, and arts
groups, chefs, retailers and even a venture capital firm have taken up
residence.

“You had a once vacant and blighted area that is now
a gravitational center for some of the most innovative companies in the
world,” said Todd Rufo, director of the San Francisco Office of
Economic and Workforce Development.

Not to be outdone, the rest
of San Francisco is in the middle of an impressive building boom.
Developers are building office towers downtown for the first time in
five years, many confident enough to build without signed leases for the
space. Other buildings are undergoing extensive renovation. Branches of
technology companies, old and new, like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and
Yahoo, are expanding or moving to the city and now make up more than
half of demand for office space. (During the tech bubble in the late
1990s, tech accounted for only a quarter of demand.)

“People
tend to build when they can lease and make money,” said Meade N.
Boutwell, a senior vice president at commercial real estate brokerage
C.B.R.E. in San Francisco.

In 2013, San Francisco became the
second-most-expensive city in the country, behind New York, in which to
rent office space. Rents rose from to $53.84 per square foot from $46.12
in the third quarter, according to C.B.R.E. Vacancy levels stand at 8.2
percent, down from 9.7 percent the same time last year. Four years ago,
it was 15 percent.

Rob Speyer, co-chief executive officer of
Tishman Speyer, a big real estate developer based in New York, said,
“San Francisco has led the U.S. commercial real estate market out of the
financial crisis.”

Tishman Speyer is betting heavily on the
city by starting construction on two speculative office buildings with
debt-free financing. After buying a parking lot in an area called South
of Market, or SoMa, the firm began building the city’s first speculative
office tower since the recession.

Nearly 18 months into
construction, Neustar, a data analytics company, agreed to lease four of
the building’s 10 floors to consolidate its Bay Area offices.

“This is a strategic decision for 10 years, not three,” said Mark F.
Bregman, Neustar’s senior vice president and chief technology officer.

Tishman Speyer is also gambling on another former parking lot, where a
26-story office tower is taking shape and should open in two years. No
leases have been signed yet, but Mr. Speyer said the decision “took less
courage than others.”

Mr. Speyer added: “There were literally
no construction starts, vacancy was dropping into the low single digits
and rents were increasing 30 percent a year. It was obvious to us the
market could support not just one but several buildings.”

The
emphasis on San Francisco signifies how Silicon Valley, an area
extending south from just below San Francisco to San Jose, Calif., no
longer has a grip on technology companies. About 18 months ago, tech
companies started moving or expanding here to be closer to their
employees.

Venture capitalists, traditionally sequestered in
the valley to be close to start-ups and entrepreneurs, are also setting
up outposts in San Francisco. Some of the biggest, like Kleiner Perkins
Caufield & Byers, have opened offices here to give them a place to
incubate their seed companies and to hold events to meet new ones.

Christina Lee, a marketing and communications partner at Kleiner
Perkins in Menlo Park, Calif., said “the partnership is more active in
the city than in the last four decades.”

The tax incentive
offered by the city gives companies moving to the Mid-Market
neighborhood a break from paying the city’s 1.5 percent payroll tax for
six years on employees hired after its move. Before the city passed the
incentive, it was estimated Twitter would save about $22 million over
six years. The city would not provide updated savings figures, saying it
was confidential information.

The city also now offers all
companies a tax break on stock options when they are exercised. And now
that Twitter is poised to issue its initial public offering next
Wednesday, some analysts have estimated that San Francisco could lose
millions of dollars more in revenue if Twitter’s employees begin cashing
in their options.

Karen Wickre, a spokeswoman for Twitter,
defended the tax breaks the company had received. “The mayor and board
of supervisors realized the existing tax structure taxed job creation,
so to keep start-ups like ours in the city, they created a limited
exemption for the Mid-Market zone,” she said. “The tax exemption was
certainly a factor, but so was the chance to stay in the city in a
landmark building.”

Although the payroll tax break gets much
credit for drawing companies to the neighborhood, its spacious buildings
also attracted companies at a time when the vacancy rate in SoMa, where
many of the tech companies have opened offices, is 3 to 4 percent,
according to Jones Lang LaSalle, the real estate services company.

So the Mid-Market area began to look attractive to developers. TMG
Partners and DivcoWest, San Francisco real estate firms, bought a
16-story 354,000-square-foot government building in 2011 a block away
from Twitter’s new office. Even though it is outside the payroll tax
exclusion zone, the company renovated it for leasing. Dolby
Laboratories, the audio company, agreed to purchase it for $110 million
in 2012.

“People look at that and say, ‘What a deal,’ but we
saw a transitioning neighborhood and foresaw it taking off in three to
five years, not two,” said Matt Field, a managing director at TMG
Partners. With 700 employees scattered in three aging rental buildings
in San Francisco, Dolby needed a central building and did not want to
leave the city where it was founded. Very few buildings were large
enough and could be renovated for laboratories.

“You really
have to be looking forward if you’re buying this building in this
neighborhood. We’re buying for the future,” said Lewis Chew, chief
financial officer for Dolby.

Across the street from Twitter,
Crescent Heights, a Miami developer, is erecting a 754-unit apartment
complex that is the biggest of the new residential developments in the
neighborhood. Its first 26-story tower opened last month, and a second
building, with 37 stories, will open next year.

After Twitter
announced it was moving to the area, the developer scrapped its original
plans and tailored the apartments for the tech workers who would be
employed nearby. Residents of NEMA, short for New Market, as the
development is called, will have amenities like a saltwater pool,
landscaped terraces, valet parking and dog-walking services.

“We wanted to participate even more in the renaissance of the area. We
wanted to set an example and provide the most creative offerings,” said
Bruce Menin, principal at Crescent Heights.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

3) That Other Big Afghan Crisis, the Growing Army of Addicts
By
AZAM AHMED

ISLAM
QALA, Afghanistan — The addicts stalk the streets of this border post
like hollowed-out skeletons, hair matted by filth and eyes glassy. The
villages that hug the roads are veritable zombie towns, where families
of men, women and children hide their addiction within barren mud
compounds.

“Sometimes I feel it is better to die than live like
this,” said Haidar, 30, seated on the floor of his living room beside a
small tin of sugarlike powder.

His family, a wife and young children, bore the gaunt faces of addiction as well.

In western Herat Province, held up as an island of stability and
progress in Afghanistan, this forlorn border town is instead a showcase
for an intensifying crisis: Long the global leader in opium production,
Afghanistan has now also become one of the world’s most addicted
societies.

The number of drug users in Afghanistan is estimated
to be as high as 1.6 million, or about 5.3 percent of the population,
among the highest rates in the world. Nationwide, one in 10 urban
households has at least one drug user, according to a recent report from
the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. In
the city of Herat, it is one in five.

From 2005 to 2009, the use of opiates doubled, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime,
putting Afghanistan on par with Russia and Iran, and the number of
heroin users jumped more than 140 percent. Most drug experts think the
rate of drug use has only increased since then.

In a country
troubled by adversity, from its long-running war to rampant corruption,
drug addiction ranks low among national priorities. Government funding
for treatment and outreach is less than $4 million a year. There are
just under 28,000 formal treatment slots available nationwide, officials
say, and such programs rely heavily on roughly $12 million a year in
extra international funding for treatment.

The focus of the
international community and the Afghan government has instead been on
reducing opium production. Since the beginning of the war in 2001, the
Americans have spent more than $6 billion to curb Afghanistan’s opium
industry, including eradication and alternative crop subsidies. The
effort has struggled, and in many areas eradication efforts have been
unofficially abandoned as too costly in terms of lost public support for
government.

In the last two years, opium cultivation has
increased to the highest level since 2008, as global demand and prices
remain robust.

The sheer volume of supply has fueled domestic
demand, a phenomenon the United Nations drug czar in Afghanistan refers
to as “the Coca-Cola effect,” after the company’s market-saturation
tactics.

Cementing the status quo is a lack of treatment
options, like methadone substitution, or a holistic plan to address the
crisis.

“This is a tsunami for our country,” said Dr. Ahmad
Fawad Osmani, the director of drug demand reduction for the Ministry of
Public Health. “The only thing our drug production has brought us is one
million drug users.”

While it has grown far worse in the past
few years, the drug crisis in Afghanistan is not new. International
health officials caught on early to the problem, which in some measure
stemmed from the traditional use of opium for medication.

In
fact, one of the earliest challenges Afghan security forces had to
surmount was a public image as a band of opium-addled thieves.

The problem, while more controlled, still exists: Just last month, the
nation’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security,
fired 65 employees after discovering they were addicted to opium.

In rural areas, the problem is expected to be worse. In some villages,
the rate of drug use is as high as 30 percent of the population, based
on hair, urine and saliva samples taken by the authors of the urban
study. And drugs not traditionally in wide use here, including crystal
methamphetamine, are now figuring in the problem as well.

Perhaps nowhere in Afghanistan presents a bleaker picture of addiction
than Herat Province. Widely held up as a success story, the province
enjoys a booming economy, a relatively progressive society and a vibrant
capital free of the trash-strewn streets and waterways that choke most
large Afghan cities.

But beneath the surface, Herat is contending with the country’s most serious drug addiction problem.

The head of the counternarcotics ministry in Herat says there are
60,000 to 70,000 addicts in the province, though some health officials
figure the number is closer to 100,000. In the capital, roughly 8
percent of the population uses drugs, the new international report
found.

The addiction crisis brings with it all manner of problems, including crime and public health concerns. A 2010 report by
Johns Hopkins University found that about 18 percent of intravenous
drug users in the provincial capital were infected with H.I.V., compared
with just 3 percent in Kabul.

Long a staging area for men who
work as day laborers in Iran, Islam Qala is now also a frequent waypoint
for addicts returning to Herat. Most of the men say they picked up
their habits while in Iran. The authorities there, struggling to deal
with a widespread drug crisis of their own, are quick to banish Afghan
addicts back across the border by the thousands, and the deported people
stream back into Islam Qala six days a week.

In Herat’s
capital, addicts fill the streets and parks, begging from pedestrians
and motorists with relentless persistence. Pockets of the city have been
transformed into junkie ghettos, like Kamar Kulagh, a roadside slum of
sandbags, rocks and rags.

On a recent day, the faint outline of
figures crawled through the bleached landscape, situated to the side of
a highway on the northern edge of the city. Broken glass covered the
hillside leading down to the encampment.

A makeshift lounge
constructed of a discarded truck grill and broken toilet seats offered
respite from the sun. The smell of feces wafted through the air.

Azim Niazi, 30, shuffled through the village clutching two bags bulging
with empty bottles, recycling them to pay for a drug habit that he said
he had picked up as a laborer in Iran.

Wahid Ahmad, 27, who said he had been living there since he was deported from Iran two years ago, joined him.

The two began discussing the death that morning of one of the camp residents, a man they knew only as Reza.

“This is the third day someone has died here,” Mr. Ahmad said, listing
the illnesses that plague residents of the camp. He paused, reflecting
for a moment as the whir of traffic raced by above. Bloodshot eyes
crouched within his gaunt face.

The pair walked deeper into the
camp to check on Reza’s body, stretched out in a stone den with a
yellowed plastic roof. Reza lay on his back, the bottom of his gray
shalwar pulled over his emaciated face. Flies buzzed in and out of the
hovel. A heavy perfume masked the decay.

“His friend will die
tomorrow,” said Mr. Niazi, pointing to a man, a skeleton cloaked in
skin, lying in a sliver of shade nearby.

A man strolled past, carting his 2-year-old daughter in his arms.

Though many of the addicts in Herat came by way of Iran and Islam Qala,
others decided to stay nearer the border — or are simply unable to make
their own way anymore.

Substance abuse has taken root in the
local community too, infecting entire villages around Islam Qala,
including young children hooked by secondhand opium smoke.

“The
entire region is addicted, whole villages,” said Arbah Shahabuddin, an
elder in Islam Qala. “If you take off your shoes, the addicts will steal
them.”

To demonstrate the devastation, Mr. Shahabuddin, a homeopathic doctor, offered a tour of the drug villages.

A maze of dirt roads divides the homes, which sit behind high mud
walls. Mr. Shahabuddin pointed to the new construction peeking over the
walls of select compounds: smugglers’ homes.

“Anyone here that looks clean is a smuggler,” he explained.

House to house, Mr. Shahabuddin went, dragging families from their
compounds into the blinding daylight to tell their stories. They stood
startled, somewhat incoherent and mostly debilitated by addiction.

At one home, a woman answered the door and ran to collect her husband,
Dad Mohammad, who was getting high. Mr. Mohammad, 35, said he had been
using heroin for the past seven years. “It’s very easy to find heroin
here,” he said.

His wife, Bibi Gul, standing in the doorway of
their home, complained that her husband beat her every day and took
money from their children to feed his addiction.

Mr. Mohammad, wearing a woolen hat in the midday heat, stared into the distance, smiling.

A couple of weeks ago, a street team from Sendapackage.com
was standing on a sidewalk near Columbus Circle in Manhattan talking
with a dozen women about to board a charter bus that would take them
upstate to visit their relatives in prison. It was 10 p.m. and many of
the women huddled in the darkness were toting sleepy children; most were
also burdened with plastic bags of Pop Tarts, pretzels, cookies and
potato chips — junk food unavailable to men behind bars.

The
team from Sendapackage, which could be thought of as prison’s version of
Amazon.com, was handing out glossy catalogs offering New York’s 50,000
inmates hundreds of items for purchase and delivery: soft drinks,
cigarettes, canned ravioli, cotton hoodies and — perhaps most popular of
all — music on cassette tape, the only format that corrections
regulations will allow.

“We’ve got same-day shipping and a 10
percent discount on first-time orders,” the team’s coordinator, Zerimar
Ramirez (or Mr. Z), was telling the group. As some of the women flipped
with interest through the product line, a video crew stood ready if any
of them cared to go on camera and provide a testimonial.

Though it might surprise many who have no experience with prison,
sending packages to loved ones doing time can be, as thousands of local
families know, a Kafkaesque process. Beyond the hassle of going to
several stores to assemble a package, and then having to take it to the
post office or UPS, is navigating a welter of rules governing what is
allowable.

The New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision publishes a list,
currently more than 20 pages long, of who can send what, and how, and
what is permitted and what is not. Food cannot contain poppy seeds;
emery boards must be “nonmetallic”; boxer shorts and briefs must be of a
solid color only.

“I thought there had to be a better way,”
said Chris Barrett, Sendapackage’s founder, who seems to have discovered
that way on the Internet. The items that Mr. Barrett’s service sells
online (as well as through its catalog) have all been chosen in advance
to adhere to the extensive directives put in place for gifts by the
corrections department. His selection is comprehensive and diverse
enough that the company bills itself as “New York’s inmate superstore.”

In a city that appears more and more to be colonized by
corporate-funded start-ups, Sendapackage, which is two years old, has an
exceptionally personal creation myth. The idea came to Mr. Barrett in
2008, not long after his younger brother, Robert Maffei, was sentenced
to 25 years to life in prison for a murder in Brooklyn. When he was 19,
Mr. Maffei killed a man
after firing a pistol from a moving car. After he was put away, Mr.
Barrett, who had himself served six years on a mob-related gun charge,
tried to send him some deodorant and a package of salami at the Sullivan
Correctional Facility, in Fallsburg.

Mr. Barrett was unaware
that the items had been made with alcohol, which is forbidden inside
prison. As he recounts the story, a guard disposed of his
well-intentioned gifts as soon as they arrived.

“Eventually I
started hearing that other people — wives and moms who didn’t know the
rules, who didn’t have time to go shopping — were having the same
problem,” Mr. Barrett said. “I began to sense there was a need here, a
real need.”

Though he had worked in marketing and been a
nightclub co-owner after his release from prison, Mr. Barrett at that
point had no experience as a digital entrepreneur. So he took a year, he
said, pricing items, building a website and developing relationships
with vendors — “Everything we needed,” he explained, “to pitch the
idea.”

In late 2010, after several months of looking for an
angel, he finally persuaded a Brooklyn businessman to fund his nascent
venture with a personal check for $1.5 million.

Within six
months, Mr. Barrett had rented space in a warehouse in the Bronx and
quickly filled its shelves with basic items: brushed-twill baseball
caps, cans of Beefaroni.
As time went by, he added to his inventory, gradually expanding into
watches, gummi bears, stereo headphones and exfoliating moisturizing
creams.

Last year, he struck what was his biggest and most
promising deal to date, persuading Universal Records to produce, on
cassette, a line of new music popular with inmates. Compact discs are
not allowed in prison because they can be broken into shivs. But arguing
that he had access to an audience that was literally captive, Mr.
Barrett persuaded Universal to manufacture a limited supply of R&B
and hip-hop tapes, in an exclusive arrangement, provided that he bought
them on consignment and in bulk.

“No one makes cassette tapes
anymore,” Mr. Barrett said, still sounding vaguely amazed. “I’m probably
the only guy on the planet with Kanye West’s new album on tape.”

Judging by the letters he has received, Mr. Barrett, who is slim of
build and 40, has managed to transform himself into something like the
R. H. Macy of the state prison system.

Even the state corrections department,
an agency not known for its entrepreneurial spirit, has quietly
supported Mr. Barrett’s efforts. Declining to comment specifically on
Sendapackage, Tom Mailey, a department spokesman, said, “From our point
of view, any vendor that is compliant with the rules and regulations and
directives regarding packages will work for us.”

On an
ordinary day, Sendapackage handles up to 40 orders. About a third are
placed online by relatives on the outside; most of the rest arrive from
inside prisons by telephone or mail.

Mr. Barrett said the
average order was usually in the neighborhood of $110. With seven
employees, he currently serves all of New York’s 58 state prisons, and
he would like to expand into neighboring Pennsylvania and into states
like Texas and California, which have very large numbers of inmates.
After paying for its inventory, Sendapackage earns about $800,000 a
year, Mr. Barrett said. He said he was simply waiting to accrue
sufficient capital to grow.

“We’re not making a killing yet,” he said. “But we’re getting there.”

While some might be squeamish about having a criminal customer base,
Mr. Barrett, perhaps because of his own incarceration, offers the same
kinds of promotions and perks that businesses whose clients are on the
outside use: He offers inmates a 10 percent discount on orders near
their birthdays, for example (“Thank you for the generous gift
certificate!” another customer wrote), and he donates 5 percent of his
profits to a charity called In Arm’s Reach, which gives assistance to children with incarcerated parents.

Using his connections to the hip-hop world, made through his nightclubs
and the cassette-tape deal, Mr. Barrett also hosts parties for his
clients’ families, including one last Thanksgiving at which the local
rapper Jadakiss appeared.

“It’s a tough experience when somebody you love goes away,” said Mr.
Ramirez, the street-team coordinator who once served as the head of
security at the Griffin, Mr.
Barrett’s nightclub in the meatpacking district. “So on top of
everything else, we try to do a few events every year that are fun.”

As far as business models go, Sendapackage’s is more or less
recession-proof, and as Mr. Barrett noted, its target demographic is
extremely loyal.

“I’ve never seen a business,” he said, “where you can get and keep a customer for as long as we keep ours.”

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5) Wealth in the USA
What Americans don't know and don't understand is quite an obstacle to
progress.

If
you think the widening chasm between the rich and the rest spells
trouble for American democracy, have a look at the growing gulf between
the information-rich and-poor.

Earlier this year, a Harvard
economist’s jaw-dropping study of American’s beliefs about the
distribution of American wealth became a viral video. Now a new Pew study of the distribution of American news consumption is just as flabbergasting.

According
to the Harvard study, most people believe that the top 20 percent of
the country owns about half the nation’s wealth, and that the lower 60
percent combined, including the 20 percent in the middle, have only
about 20 percent of the wealth. A whopping 92 percent of Americans
think this is out of whack; in the ideal distribution, they said, the
lower 60 percent would have about half of the wealth, with the middle 20
percent of the people owning 20 percent of the wealth.

What’s
astonishing about this is how wrong Americans are about reality. In
fact, the bottom 80 percent owns only seven percent of the nation’s
wealth, and the top one percent hold more of the country’s wealth—40 percent—than nine-out-of-ten people think the top 20 percent should have. The top ten percent of earners take home half the income
of the country; in 2012, the top one percent earned more than a fifth
of U.S. income—the highest share since the government began collecting
the data a century ago.

But America’s information inequality is at least as shocking as its economic inequality.

Pew
sliced the TV news audience into thirds: heavy, medium and light. In
my Jeffersonian fantasy, that distribution would look like a bell curve;
in fact, it looks like a cliff. Heavy viewers watch a little over two
hours of TV news a day, but medium viewers barely watch a quarter of an
hour and light viewers average only two minutes a day. The top third of
the country does 88 percent of the day’s TV news viewing; the middle
third watches only ten percent of the total time; the bottom third sees
just two percent of the minutes of news consumed. Two-thirds of
Americans live in an information underclass as journalistically
impoverished as the minuscule bazillionaire class is triumphant. This
month, the Pew Research Journalism Project reported how Americans get
their news at home. If you think it’s from the Internet, you’ll be
surprised that the 38 percent of us who access news at home on a desktop
or laptop spend an average of only 90 seconds a day getting news
online. America’s dominant news source is television, and the disparity
between heavy viewers of TV news and everyone else is as startling as
the gap between the plutocrats and the people.

As for those
heavy news viewers, says Pew, “There is no news junkie like a cable
junkie.” A heavy local news viewer watches about 22 minutes of it a day
at home, and a heavy network news viewer watches about 32 minutes a
day. But a heavy cable news consumer averages 72 minutes of it a day.
The gap between heavy, medium and light cable news viewers is especially
stark. If you’re reading this, you’re probably in that
72-minutes-of-cable-news-a-day class. But medium cable news viewers see
barely more than three minutes of it a day, and light cable news
viewers see about 12 seconds of it a day. In other words, either you
live in the country that watches more than an hour of Blitzer, O’Reilly,
Maddow, et al, a day—or in the country that watches virtually none of
them at all.

If you want to know where this is heading, consider another cheery piece of Pew research.
Americans 67 to 84 years old spend 84 minutes a day watching, reading
or listening to the news. Boomers (48 to 66) are close behind, at 77
minutes a day. But Gen Xers (33 to 47) spend 66 minutes, and
Millennials (18 to 31) spend only 46 minutes a day. The kids are tuning
out. I love it that 43 percent of “The Colbert Report” audience, and
39 percent of “The Daily Show” viewers, are 18 to 29 years old;
the young audiences of those fake news shows get real news from them.
But fewer than a million-and-a-half Americans under 50 are watching
them.

Much has been made of the ideological news bubbles we live
in, where we see the world exclusively through Fox-colored lenses, or
filters manufactured only by MSNBC or CNN. The Pew study upends this
belief. It’s true that about one-quarter of American adults watch only
Fox News, another quarter watch only CNN and 15 percent watch only
MSNBC. But 28 percent of Fox News viewers also watch MSNBC, and 34
percent of MSNBC viewers watch Fox. More than half of MSNBC viewers,
and nearly half of Fox viewers, watch CNN, and of CNN’s viewers, about
four-out-of-ten also watch Fox, and four-out-of-ten also watch MSNBC.

It’s
encouraging that our self-segregation into polarized news ghettos is a
bit of a myth. But whatever joy there is in that finding is blunted by
the disparity between people who watch a lot of news and people who
watch almost none of it, and by the trend toward an even deeper division
ahead. The danger democracy faces isn’t so much that different
segments of our country inhabit alternative realities constructed from
different data delivered by different news sources. It’s that a
minority of the country watches a fair amount of news, and a majority
may as well be living on the moon.

6) Clemency for Snowden? U.S. Officials Say No
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
November 3, 2013http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/clemency-for-snowden-u-s-officials-say-no/?ref=us

If Edward J. Snowden believes
he deserves clemency for his disclosures of classified government
documents because they provoked an important public debate about the
reach of American spying, he has failed to sway the White House and at
least two key members of Congress.

The chairwoman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and
her House counterpart, Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, gave sharply
negative answers on Sunday when asked whether they believed Mr. Snowden
had made a case for clemency.

“He was trusted; he stripped our
system; he had an opportunity – if what he was, was a whistle-blower –
to pick up the phone and call the House Intelligence Committee, the
Senate Intelligence Committee, and say I have some information,” Ms.
Feinstein said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” But “that didn’t
happen.”

“He’s done this enormous disservice to our country,” she added, “and I think the answer is no clemency.”

Mr. Rogers was equally adamant.

“No,
I don’t see any reason” to grant clemency, he said on the same program.
“I wouldn’t do that. He needs to come back and own up. We can have
those conversations, if he believes there are vulnerabilities he’d like
to disclose.”

Dan Pfeiffer, a senior White House adviser, said
on the ABC program “This Week” that there had been no consideration of
clemency, and that Mr. Snowden should return to the United States to
face charges.

Mr. Snowden’s argument – made in a “Manifesto for
the Truth” published on Sunday by the German news magazine Der Spiegel
and in a letter to American officials handed to a leftist German
politician who met with Mr. Snowden in Moscow – was that he has started a
useful debate about whether American spies are overreaching with the
help of enormously powerful technology and should be reined in.

Federal
prosecutors have charged Mr. Snowden with theft and with two violations
of the Espionage Act of 1917. But Mr. Snowden, who has taken refuge in
Russia, has denied any treasonous intent, saying he disclosed secrets to
the news media, not to hostile foreign powers, and did so to push for
reform.

“Instead of causing damage, the usefulness of the new
public knowledge for society is now clear because reforms to politics,
supervision and laws are being suggested,” he wrote in Der Spiegel.
“Citizens have to fight against the suppression of information about
affairs of essential importance for the public. Those who speak the
truth are not committing a crime.”

Indeed, Ms. Feinstein is
among those who have raised the question of overreach by the National
Security Agency and the need for possible reform, particularly after
reports that the agency had long monitored the cellphone of Chancellor
Angela Merkel of Germany.

Ms. Feinstein said on Sunday that she
strongly supported a White House review to consider a more appropriate
framework for intelligence operations. She wants her committee to
conduct its own review.

Tapping the private phones of close
allies, she said, “has much more political liability than probably
intelligence viability, and I think we ought to look at it carefully. I
believe the president is doing that.”

As to the question of
whether President Obama could have been unaware of such phone monitoring
– and whether the Europeans who have expressed outrage over National
Security Agency espionage could have been truly surprised that such
high-level spying goes on – Mr. Rogers replied: “I think there’s going
to be some Best Actor Awards coming out of the White House this year,
and Best Supporting Actor Awards coming out of the European Union.”

He
said that fundamentally, the security agency was doing the work it had
been created to do, a belief that Ms. Feinstein said she largely shared.

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7) Lawyers Challenge Detention of Greenwald’s Partner in London
By
STEVEN ERLANGER

LONDON
— Lawyers challenged on Wednesday the legality of the detention at
Heathrow Airport in August of David Michael Miranda, the partner of the
journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been writing about the secret
documents taken by a former analyst for the National Security Agency,
Edward J. Snowden.

Mr. Miranda, 28, was stopped while transiting
from Berlin to Brazil and his computer, telephone and memory sticks
were confiscated. They contained around 58,000 encrypted, secret files
from the Snowden archive, the British government said.

British
intelligence officials are still trying to decrypt all of the files to
see exactly what Mr. Miranda was carrying, but have argued that the
stolen documents and the stories written based on them have damaged
national security and aided global terrorism.

Mr. Miranda had
been traveling home to Brazil, where he lives with Mr. Greenwald, after
visiting Germany, where he met with Laura Poitras, an American filmmaker
who has worked with Mr. Snowden and Mr. Greenwald on the N.S.A.
stories. Mr. Miranda has said that he did not know the contents of what
he was ferrying back to Brazil on a ticket paid for by The Guardian
newspaper, for which Mr. Greenwald was then working.

Lawyers
for Mr. Miranda challenged the legality of using counterterrorism powers
at ports of entry in this case, arguing that the law was misused and
Mr. Miranda’s fundamental rights were violated. Matthew Ryder, Mr.
Miranda’s lawyer, argued that the case hinged on Schedule 7 of the
Terrorism Act 2000, which gives officers the power to stop, question and
detain people at ports such as airports even if wrongdoing is not
suspected.

“If the court finds that such a power was used
proportionally in seizing journalistic material in this way, we ask
court then to consider if Schedule 7 is compatible with fundamental
rights — in particular, the right to freedom of expression,” Mr. Ryder
stated. “This case illustrates vividly why it is not compatible.”

“There
aren’t many things that are more important to that idea of economic
mobility — the idea that you can make it if you try — than a good
education,” President Obama told students at the State University of New York in Buffalo in August.

It is hardly a partisan belief. About a decade ago, on signing the No Child Left Behind Act, President George W. Bush argued
that the nation’s biggest challenge was to ensure that “every single
child, regardless of where they live, how they’re raised, the income
level of their family, every child receive a first-class education in
America.”

This consensus is comforting. It provides a solution
everyone can believe in, whether the problem is income inequality,
racial marginalization or the stagnation of the middle class. But it
raises a perplexing question, too. If education is a poor child’s best
shot at rising up the ladder of prosperity, why do public resources
devoted to education lean so decisively in favor of the better off?

The anguished and often angry national debate over how to improve
American educational standards, focused intently on grading students and
teachers, mostly bypasses how the inequity of resources — starting at
the youngest — inevitably affects the outcome.

“The debate
about education reform is a lot about process,” said David Sciarra,
executive director of the Education Law Center in Newark, an advocacy
group for disadvantaged students. “To a large extent it is a huge
distraction. We never get to the question of what resources we need to
get the students to meet the standards.”

Andreas Schleicher, who runs the
O.E.C.D.’s international educational assessments, put it to me this way:
“The bottom line is that the vast majority of O.E.C.D. countries either
invest equally into every student or disproportionately more into
disadvantaged students. The U.S. is one of the few countries doing the
opposite.” The inequity of education finance in the United States is a
feature of the system, not a bug, stemming from its great degree of
decentralization and its reliance on local property taxes.

“Decentralization was wonderful for the initial diffusion of high
schools,” said Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard who
helped write “The Race between Education and Technology,” one of the
most comprehensive analyses of the spread of the American educational
system throughout the 20th century. “But it created big geographic
inequality.”

Today, the federal government provides only about
14 percent of the money for school districts from the elementary level
through high school, compared to 54 percent, on average, among other
industrial nations. More than half the money comes from local sources,
mostly property taxes, which is about twice the share in the rest of the
O.E.C.D.

This skews the playing field from early on. In New
York, for instance, in 2011 the value of property in the poorest 10
percent of school districts amounted to some $287,000 per student, according to the state’s education department. In the richest districts it amounted, on average, to $1.9 million.

The state government in Albany redresses part of the imbalance: In the
2010-11 school year it transferred $6,600 per student to the state’s
poorest school districts, about four times as much as it sent to the
richest. But it’s still a long way from closing the gap.

That
year, the most recent for which comprehensive data is available, the
wealthiest 10 percent of school districts, in rich enclaves like
Bridgehampton and Amagansett on Long Island, spent $25,505 on average
per pupil. In the poorest 10 percent of New York’s school districts — in
cities like Elmira, which has double the nation’s poverty rate and half
its median family income — the average spending per student was only
$12,861.

Disparities across the country are even starker. In
New York, schools spend an average of $19,000 per student. In Tennessee
they spend $8,200. The Alpine school district in Utah spends only
$5,321. And funding in some states is even more skewed than in New York.

The Education Law Center compiles an annual report
on the distribution of funding for education across the country,
adjusting for variation in district sizes, teacher wages and school
districts’ needs. Only 17 states, including Vermont, Massachusetts and
New Jersey, provide more money per student to high-poverty districts
than to low-poverty districts, it concluded. Funding is flat in 15
states.

In 16, including left-leaning states that provide lots
of money for education like New York and in right-leaning states that
provide very little like Texas, school funding is regressive. (Hawaii
and the District of Columbia were excluded from their analysis.)

In Illinois and Nevada, New Hampshire and North Carolina, school
districts with a poverty rate of 30 percent receive at least 20 percent
less money per pupil than districts with a 10 percent poverty rate.

Can anything be done to close these gaps?

Parents, unions and advocacy groups have mostly relied on legal
challenges, arguing that state governments have failed to provide
adequate funding for education as required by most state constitutions.
The Education Law Center counted dozens of lawsuits in 45 states since
the 1960s, including one filed earlier this year by the New York State
United Teachers and a handful of parents from poor districts like Elmira
and Stillwater who also argued that property tax ceilings prevented
poorer districts from closing the gap themselves.

Litigation has worked to some extent. But it is a blunt tool. In New Jersey,
a host of state Supreme Court decisions over the last 30 years
radically improved the funding in 31 poor urban school districts, and
helped close the gap in test scores with more affluent schools. But one
unintended consequence is that poor rural districts have lost funding.

Money, to be sure, is not a silver bullet that will automatically lift
the test scores of poor American children and close performance gaps.
How the money is deployed is absolutely crucial.

Still, the
disparity matters a lot. Social and economic deprivation has a
particularly strong impact on student performance in the United States.
Differences in socio-economic status account for 17 percent of the
variation in test scores, according to O.E.C.D. researchers, compared to
9 percent in Canada or Japan. In New York, according to Peter Applebee,
an expert on education finance at the United Teacher’s union, only 18
percent of students in the poorest 10 percent of school districts scored
above proficiency level in math last year. In the richest tenth, 45
percent did. These gaps will be hard to close until the lopsided funding
of education changes. As income and wealth continue to flow to the
richest families in the richest neighborhoods, public education appears
to be more of a force contributing to inequality of income and
opportunity, rather than helping to relieve it.

In
Colorado, voters backed a heavy tax on recreational marijuana, which
was made legal here last year. The tax will pay for the cost of
overseeing the state’s marijuana industry as well as school
construction.

Voters in three Michigan cities approved
measures legalizing the possession of up to an ounce of marijuana by
adults on private property, following Detroit and Flint,
which passed similar measures last year. And voters in Portland, Me.,
passed an ordinance legalizing the possession of up to 2.5 ounces of
marijuana by adults over 21, making it the first East Coast city to pass
such a law, advocates said.

The victories are widely
seen as fuel for the legalization movement, which has chipped away at
state drug laws over the past decade and has vowed to push for more
changes from state legislatures.

“A majority of
Americans now agree that marijuana should be legal for adults, and this
was reflected at the polls,” said Mason Tvert, a spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, one of the main groups behind the legislative initiatives across the country.

“There
is clearly momentum behind marijuana policy reform,” Mr. Tvert said.
“We expect to see these kinds of measures passing across the nation over
the next several years.”

Marijuana supporters saw
little opposition during this election cycle — evidence, they said, that
public sentiment is shifting in favor of less stringent drug laws.

In
Ferndale, Mich., nearly 70 percent of voters approved an ordinance
legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana. And in the city
of Jackson, 60 percent of residents supported a similar measure.

In
Lansing, where the mayor backed legalization, unofficial election
results showed the measure there winning handily, with 8,550 voters
supporting it and 5,339 opposing.

Chuck Ream,
co-founder of the Safer Michigan Coalition, which has pushed for
legalization for years, said he was struck by how easily the local
ordinances passed. “They were all landslides,” Mr. Ream said.

He
said advocates had gained momentum to push for a proposal pending in
Michigan’s statehouse that would make it a misdemeanor to possess small
amounts of marijuana. “We certainly hope that the Legislature will act
immediately to pass the decriminalization law for the entire state of
Michigan, now that they see that voters absolutely don’t support
prohibition any longer,” he said.

Similarly, in
Portland, Maine’s largest city, marijuana advocates said their victory —
by nearly 30 percentage points — would help persuade lawmakers to pass
legislation to regulate marijuana and alcohol in a similar manner.

“We
have always viewed this as a first step to bring the sale and
distribution of marijuana to Maine,” said David Marshall, a Portland
city councilor and one of the leading supporters of the new ordinance.

Young progressive voters turned out in large numbers, Mr. Marshall said, helping to widen the margin of victory.

“We were confident going in. We’re going to start seeing what steps we want to take to bring this to the next level,” he said.

Marijuana
remains illegal under federal law, and there is still uncertainty
around how local law enforcement officials will handle decriminalization
measures passed by municipalities.

In Portland, for
example, the city’s police chief, Michael Sauschuck, said he would
continue to enforce Maine state law, under which marijuana possession of
less than 2.5 ounces is a civil offense.

Colorado
and Washington are the only states to have legalized marijuana
statewide, and Colorado’s efforts to create a regulatory framework have
served as a prototype for marijuana advocates around the country.

On
Tuesday, a majority of Colorado voters approved a 15 percent excise tax
on the wholesale price of recreational marijuana, and an additional 10
percent sales tax on its retail price.

Lawmakers from
both parties, as well as Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, and the
state’s attorney general, a Republican, backed the tax measure, which
passed with 65 percent of the vote. “We are grateful voters approved
funding that will allow for a strong regulatory environment, just like
liquor is regulated,” Mr. Hickenlooper said in a statement. “We will do
everything in our power to make sure kids don’t smoke pot and that we
don’t have people driving who are high. This ballot measure gives
Colorado the ability to regulate marijuana properly.”

While
Sawant and Moore both trail their opponents, neither race has been
officially called. And even if they both lose, they will have received
an unusual amount of grassroots and institutional support for two
avowedly anti-capitalist candidates running in major American cities.
Additionally, they both received major labor union endorsements, and
Moore even managed to raise more money than the Democrat in the race.

“This
is an indication of how eager people are for real change,” Sawant told
msnbc. Both she and Moore ran as members of the Socialist Alternative
party, an organization alternatively described as Trotskyist or
democratic socialist.

“I think the situation across
the country is ripe for this, and our organization Socialist
Alternative. What’s unique is our organization took the initiative,”
said Moore. “I think in the post-Occupy world, with the political
discrediting of most capitalist institutions, including the two major
parties, Wall Street, the corporate-owned media—no offense
intended—there’s openness to a more bold working class challenge to the
two-party system.”

Among the issues Moore campaigned
on: A $15 minimum wage, public ownership of Minneapolis utilities, and
declaring housing to be a human right. Sawant also focused on low wages
and affordable housing as key issues, and was a vociferous supporter of
the SeaTac, Washington referendum that raised that town’s minimum wage to $15 per hour.

Both
candidates have a history of grassroots activism outside of the
electoral process. Sawant is a member of the teachers union AFT Local
1719, one of six unions to endorse her candidacy. Moore is a cofounder
of the anti-foreclosure group Occupy Homes; his campaign was endorsed by
the powerful labor organization SEIU Minnesota State Council. Sawant
also received the support of a handful of Democratic Party activists
under the banner “Democrats for Sawant,” and the endorsement of Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger.

“In
fact, we created quite a stir within the labor movement in Seattle and
the Democratic Party,” said Sawant. Her campaign says that it managed to
raise $110,000 entirely from individual donors.

Bhaskar
Sunkara, editor and publisher of the socialist publication Jacobin
Magazine, said that a younger generation of voters might be slightly
more sympathetic to the socialist cause.

“In general, a
lot of young people are demographically a lot less white, a lot of us
are first generation or immigrants coming from places where the word has
less of a taboo,” he said. “And the Cold War is over.”

Even
when wielded by Republicans as an epithet, the “s” word, as Sunkara
calls it, doesn’t seem to carry as much weight as it used to. In New
York, Democrat Bill de Blasio’s campaign was barely affected by repeated
accusations that he was a socialist or Communist sympathizer. De Blasio trounced Republican Joe Lhota on Tuesday with a 49 percent margin of victory.

“In some ways, I think the right wing has done us a favor” by accusing Democrats of being socialists, said Moore.

But
Sunkara cautioned against overestimating the meaning of Moore and
Sawant’s campaigns, arguing that they probably do not herald “the coming
tide of some third-party push.”

“I think if anything,
these are just kind of exceptional examples that we can maybe turn into
a generalized trend over the course of years,” he said.

“Our
campaigns have shown in a couple small areas how the anger at the
present system can be translated into an electoral challenge,” said
Moore, “but I don’t think it will be only electoral.” He highlighted the
recent fast food strikes as an example of crucial non-electoral organizing.

Sawant said she believed campaigns like hers would spread, but “it’s not an automatic thing.”

“Especially
young people of color are feeling a deep sense of betrayal,” said
Sawant, herself an Indian-born immigrant. “What have they gotten from
society? And they are looking for an alternative, something that speaks
to them.”

(Reuters)
- The CIA is paying AT&T more than $10 million (£6,236,357.97) a
year to provide phone records for overseas counter-terrorism
investigations, the New York Times reported, quoting government
officials.

The No. 2 U.S. mobile service provider is
cooperating under a voluntary contract, not under subpoenas or court
orders compelling the company to participate, the paper said. (http://r.reuters.com/juk54v)

The
report comes amid widespread political uproar after former National
Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents describing
how the U.S. government collects far more internet and telephone data
than previously known.

Under the AT&T
arrangement, the CIA supplies phone numbers of overseas terrorism
suspects and AT&T searches its database to provide call records
that may help identify foreign associates, the paper said.

Most of the call logs provided by AT&T involve foreign-to-foreign calls, the paper said.

AT&T
does not disclose the identity of the Americans calling from the United
States, and masks their phone numbers when it produces the records, the
paper said, quoting the officials.

AT&T was
not immediately available for comment. (Reporting by Sruthi Ramakrishnan
in Bangalore and Alina Selyukh in Washington,)

HOUSTON — Florida ran out of its primary lethal-injection drug
last month and relied on a new drug that no state had ever used for an
execution. At Ohio’s next scheduled execution, the state is planning to
use a two-drug combination for the first time. Last month in Texas,
Michael Yowell became that state’s first inmate executed using a drug
made by a lightly regulated pharmacy that usually produces customized
medications for individual patients.

The decision by
manufacturers to cut off supplies of drugs, some of which had been
widely used in executions for decades, has left many of the nation’s 32
death penalty states scrambling to come up with new drugs and protocols.
Some states have already changed their laws to keep the names of
lethal-drug suppliers private as a way to encourage them to provide
drugs.

The uncertainty is leading to delays in executions
because of legal challenges, raising concerns that condemned inmates are
being inadequately anesthetized before being executed and leading the
often-macabre process of state-sanctioned executions into a continually
shifting legal, bureaucratic and procedural terrain.

In the Florida execution, which used the new drug midazolam as part of a three-drug mix, The Associated Press reported
that the inmate, William Happ, appeared to remain conscious longer and
made more body movements after losing consciousness than those executed
with the old formula.

“We have seen more changes in lethal
injection protocols in the last five years than we have seen in the last
three decades,” said Deborah W. Denno, a professor at Fordham Law
School and a death penalty expert. “These states are just scrambling for
drugs, and they’re changing their protocols rapidly and carelessly.”

All 32 states with legalized executions
use lethal injection as their primary option for executions. Of the
more than 250 executions since 2008, all but five were done with lethal
injections.

Facing increasing pressure and scrutiny from death
penalty opponents, manufacturers of several drugs used in lethal
injections — including sodium thiopental and pentobarbital
— over the past few years have ceased production of the drugs or
required that they not be used in executions. Looking for alternatives,
state prison systems have been more eager to try new drugs, buy drugs
from new sources, keep the identities of their drug suppliers secret and
even swap drugs among states.

A week before the execution of a
convicted murderer, Arturo Diaz, in September, Texas prison officials
received two packages of pentobarbital from the Virginia Department of
Corrections, at no charge; the state with the country’s second-busiest
death chamber acting as ad-hoc pharmacy to the state with the busiest.

Several states have turned to compounding pharmacies, which are largely
unregulated by the Food and Drug Administration and overseen primarily
by the states. They have traditionally made specialized drugs, for
instance, turning a medication into a cream or gel if a patient has
trouble swallowing pills.

In Missouri, the availability of drugs and litigation have slowed the pace of executions. There have been two since 2009.

“We are going to continue to be affected by these pharmaceutical
company decisions time and again, unless the death penalty states can
find a pharmaceutical product that has some supply stability around it,”
said Chris Koster, the attorney general in Missouri, which dropped
plans to use the anesthetic propofol after the European Union threatened
to limit exports of the drug if it was used in an execution.

The drug shortages and legal wrangling have led some officials to
discuss older methods of execution. In July, Mr. Koster suggested that
the state might want to bring back the gas chamber. Dustin McDaniel, the
attorney general in Arkansas, which has struggled with its
lethal-injection protocol, told lawmakers the state’s fallback method of
execution was the electric chair.

Mr. Koster and Mr. McDaniel
said they were not advocating the use of the gas chamber or the electric
chair, but were talking about the possible legal alternatives to an
increasingly problematic method for states.

“No state has had
any success with getting their hands on the cocktail that has heretofore
been relied upon,” Mr. McDaniel said. He said that lawyers for the
state are trying to navigate the appeals process in death penalty cases
while knowing that “if the legal hurdles were magically to go away, we
are in no position to carry out an execution in this state.”

In
their rush to find drugs, death penalty states have opened a new wave
of lawsuits that have delayed executions at a time when public support
for the death penalty has waned and a handful of states have abolished
it in recent years. A recent Gallup poll found that 60 percent of
Americans favor the death penalty for convicted murderers, the lowest
support in nearly 41 years.

Lawyers for seven Florida death row
inmates have challenged the constitutionality of a lethal-injection
protocol that uses midazolam as an anesthetic. And Missouri was sued by
the American Civil Liberties Union after it added drug suppliers to its
execution team. Such a move prevents the public and the courts from
learning the names of the suppliers, because a state secrecy law
provides anonymity to members of the execution team.

Those laws
not only protect drug suppliers from negative publicity and harassment,
but make it easier for prison systems to get the drugs because they can
offer anonymity to reluctant suppliers. A similar law in Georgia is
under review by the State Supreme Court, delaying for months the
execution of Warren Hill.

But even the method of drug payment has entered a strange new realm.

Texas prison officials bought pentobarbital at a compounding pharmacy
in a Houston suburb, using a credit card instead of the usual purchase
order. Oklahoma has been quietly buying its lethal injection drugs using
the state prison agency’s petty-cash accounts, and at one point got
money for the drugs from the same account it used to pay for released
inmates’ Greyhound bus tickets. State prison officials said they use the
petty-cash funds to leave no public paper trail of the identities of
drug suppliers or the state’s executioners.

“You want to be
able to protect the identities of the people participating, the
executioners and the supplier of the drugs,” said Jerry Massie, the
Oklahoma Corrections Department spokesman.

Other moves by
states to get drugs, including using compounding pharmacies, have
troubled death penalty opponents. In Texas, prison officials bought
compounded pentobarbital without a prescription. Maurie Levin, a lawyer
representing death row inmates, said the lack of a prescription raised
legal questions.

Katherine Fretland contributed reporting from New Orleans.

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13) Honesty Doesn't Pay Off for Ex-Homeless Man
By
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

HACKENSACK, N.J. — A good deed has come back to haunt a formerly homeless northern New Jersey man.

James Brady found $850 on a Hackensack sidewalk last April and turned
it in to police. Brady was awarded the money six months later after no
one contacted police during the required waiting period.

Now, The Record (http://bit.ly/1bfBrVI ) reports that Brady has been denied General Assistance and Medicaid
benefits by the Hackensack Human Services Department through Dec. 31
because he failed to report the $850 as new income he received.

The director of human services tells the newspaper they are just following the rules.

Brady was homeless when he found the money but has since found housing.
He was featured in news reports nationwide for turning in the money,
despite his own financial struggles.

Saturday,
November 9 will be a National Day of Action demanding Justice for Andy
Lopez Cruz, the 13-year-old boy who was shot and killed by Sonoma County
Sheriff’s deputy Erick Gelhaus, on Oct. 22. The killing has sparked an
unprecedented wave of mass protests in Santa Rosa. On November 4, the
Lopez Cruz family, represented by attorney Arnoldo Casillas, filed a
lawsuit against Sonoma County and Gelhaus.

Rallies,
marches, speakouts and other actions will be taking place in many cities
across California and around the country on Nov. 9, including:

Why did BART and AC Transit
union officials put their faith in Democratic politicians rather than reaching
out aggressively to labor and the community? Why did ATU 1555 leaders call on
Jerry Brown to invoke a 60-day cooling-off period to suspend the right to
strike? How can we defend the right to strike for transit workers, when
Democratic state politicians are drafting legislation to make such strikes
illegal?

Why did ILWU officials turn
their backs on their union's militant history and direct their members to cross
a picket line of port truckers and community supporters? How can ILWU members
reclaim the solidarity their union badly needs. Longshoremen are locked out at
two northwest ports. Scabs are doing their work. And negotiations for the
ILWU's master contract for all West Coast ports is just around the bend.

Has the labor movement lost
its class struggle moorings? In its heyday unions fought for the unemployed and
underemployed, for immigrant workers and youth, against racism and home
foreclosures. What can be done to ignite such struggle today, forge real
solidarity, and beat the bosses' barrage of union busting? Come hear speakers
involved in these worker struggles:

George Figueroa- Strike
Coordinator of the successful July BART strike for ATU Local 1555*, now being
victimized by BART.

A Member ATU Local
192*

A Port trucker
organizer*

Clarence Thomas- Co-Chair of the
Million Worker March, Executive Board member of ILWU 10

(*for identification
purposes only)

This forum is organized by
the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee (www.transportworkers.org)

By James Branum and Courage to Resist. November 4, 2013
Fort Carson, Colorado – Imprisoned war resister PFC Kimberly Rivera
has submitted a clemency application seeking a reduction by 45 days in
the 10 month prison sentence she received for seeking asylum in Canada
rather return to her unit in Iraq.

The request for clemency was
based on humanitarian reasons due to pregnancy. Unless clemency is
granted, Private First Class Kimberly Rivera will be forced to give
birth in prison and then immediately relinquish custody of her son while
she continues to serve the remainder of her sentence.

Unfortunately military regulations provide no provisions for her to be able to breastfeed her infant son while she is in prison.
Fort Carson Senior Commander Brigadier General Michael A. Bills will
be making a decision on PFC Rivera’s clemency request in the coming
weeks.
PFC Rivera’s case made international news when she was the first
female US soldier in the current era to flee to Canada for reasons of
conscience. After a protracted struggle through the Canadian legal
system, she was deported back to the United States in September 2012.
She was then immediately arrested and sent back to the Army to stand
trial.In an interview with Courage to Resist on the eve of her court-martial,
Rivera said, “When I saw the little girl [in Iraq] shaking in fear, in
fear of me, because of my uniform, I couldn’t fathom what she had been
through and all I saw was my little girl and I just wanted to hold her
and comfort her. But I knew I couldn’t. It broke my heart. I am against
hurting anyone… I would harm myself first. I felt this also made me a
liability to my unit and I could not let me be a reason for anyone to be
harmed—so I left... Even though I did not fill out the official
application to obtain conscientious objector status, I consider myself a
conscientious objector to all war.”
On April 29, 2013, PFC Rivera pled to charges of desertion. She was
sentenced by the military judge to fourteen months in prison, loss of
rank and pay, and a dishonorable discharge; thanks to a pre-trial
agreement her sentence was reduced to an actual sentence to ten months
of confinement and a bad-conduct discharge.Kimberly Rivera has been recognized by Amnesty International as a “prisoner of conscience.” She is the mother of four children, ages 11, 9, 4 and 2.
Kimberly Rivera’s request for clemency was accompanied by 495 letters
of support, written by family members, friends, as well as members of
Amnesty International from 19 countries.
“We have many organizations to thank for the outpouring of support
for Kimberly Rivera, including Amnesty International, Courage to Resist,
the War Resisters Support Campaign of Canada, Veterans for Peace and
Coffee Strong,” said James M. Branum, civilian defense attorney for PFC
Rivera. “We also want to recognize the tireless efforts of local
supporters in Colorado Springs and San Diego who have taken the time to
visit Kim in prison as well as to provide important support to Kim’s
family in her absence.”
While the official clemency request is now complete, supporters of
PFC Rivera are still encouraged to continue to speak out on her behalf.
Letters in support of PFC Rivera’s clemency request can be sent directly
to:

Photos: Top-Kimberly with husband Mario
during her court martial. Middle-Kimberly in Canada prior to being
deported. Bottom-Courage to Resist rallies outside Canadian Consulate,
San Francisco CA, prior to Kimberly's forced return.

Initial press release
by The Center for Conscience in Action, an Oklahoma City-based
organization dedicated to the intersection of peace, conscience and
direct action. CCA’s Legal Support Project provides low and no cost
legal representation to military service members seeking discharge on
the grounds of conscience.For more information or to schedule an interview about this
subject, please contact James M. Branum, lead defense counsel for PFC
Rivera, at 405-494-0562 or girightslawyer(at)gmail(dot)com. Consolidated
Brig Miramar generally forbids inmates from doing interviews with the
press, but you are welcome to see if an exception can be made by
contacting the Brig Public Affairs office at 858-577-7071.Additional case updates will be posted at couragetoresist.org and freekimberlyrivera.org.

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Sign the Petition to Pardon Pvt. Chelsea Manning

Because the public deserves the truth and whistle-blowers deserve protection.
We are military veterans, journalists, educators, homemakers, lawyers, students, and citizens.
We ask you to consider the facts and free US Army Pvt. Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning.
As an Intelligence Analyst stationed in Iraq, Pvt. Manning had access
to some of America’s dirtiest secrets--crimes such as torture, illegal
surveillance, and corruption—often committed in our name. Manning acted
on conscience alone, with selfless courage and conviction, and gave
these secrets to us, the public.
“I believed that if the general public had access to the information
contained within the [Iraq and Afghan War Logs] this could spark a
domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy,”
Manning explained to the military court. “I wanted the American public
to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that
needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live
in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare.”
Journalists used these documents to uncover many startling truths. We learned:

Donald Rumsfeld and General Petraeus helped support torture in Iraq.

Deliberate civilian killings by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan went unpunished.

Thousands of civilian casualties were never acknowledged publicly.

Most Guantanamo detainees were innocent.

For service on behalf of an informed democracy, Manning was sentenced
by military judge Colonel Denise Lind to a devastating 35 years in
prison. Government secrecy has grown exponentially during the past
decade, but more secrecy does not make us safer when it fosters
unaccountability.
Pvt. Manning was convicted of Espionage Act charges for providing
WikiLeaks with this information, but the prosecutors noted that they
would have done the same had the information been given to The New York
Times. Prosecutors did not show that enemies used this information
against the U.S., or that the releases resulted in any casualties.
Pvt. Manning has already been punished, even in violation of military law. She has been:

Held in confinement since May 29, 2010.

Subjected to illegal punishment amounting to torture for nearly nine
months at Quantico Marine Base, Virginia, in violation of the Uniform
Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), Article 13—facts confirmed by both the
United Nation’s lead investigator on torture and military judge Col.
Lind.

Denied a speedy trial in violation of UCMJ, Article 10, having been imprisoned for over three years before trial.

Denied anything resembling a fair trial when prosecutors were
allowed to change the charge sheet to match evidence presented, and
enter new evidence, after closing arguments.

Pvt. Manning believed you, Mr. President, when you came into office
promising the most transparent administration in history, and that you
would protect whistle-blowers.
We urge you to start upholding those promises, beginning with this
American prisoner of conscience.
We urge you to grant Pvt. Manning’s petition for a Presidential Pardon.

DOE CAMPAIGN
We are working to ensure that the ACCJC’s authority is not renewed by
the Department of Education this December when they are up for their
5-year renewal. Our campaign made it possible for over 50 Third Party
Comments to be sent to the DOE re: the ACCJC. Our next step in this
campaign is to send a delegation from CCSF to Washington, D.C. to give
oral comments at the hearing on December 12th. We expect to have an
array of forces aligned on the other side who have much more money and
resources than we do.So please support this effort to get ACCJC authority revoked!

LEGAL CAMPAIGN
Save CCSF members have been meeting with Attorney Dan Siegel since last
May to explore legal avenues to fight the ACCJC. After much
consideration, and consultation with AFT 2121’s attorney as well as the
SF City Attorney’s office, Dan has come up with a legal strategy that is
complimentary to what is already being pursued. In fact, AFT 2121’s
attorney is encouraging us to go forward.
The total costs of pursuing this (depositions, etc.) will be
substantially more than $15,000. However, Dan is willing to do it for a
fixed fee of $15,000. He will not expect a retainer, i.e. payment in
advance, but we should start payments ASAP. If we win the ACCJC will
have to pay our costs.

PLEASE HELP BOTH OF THESE IMPORTANT EFFORTS!
Checks can be made out to Save CCSF Coalition with “legal” in the memo line and sent to:

16 Years in Solitary Confinement Is Like a "Living Tomb"
American Civil Liberties Union petition to end long-term solitary confinement:
California
Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard: We stand with the prisoners on
hunger strike. We urge you to comply with the US Commission on Safety
and Abuse in America’s Prisons 2006 recommendations regarding an end to
long-term solitary confinement.
Sign the petition:
https://www.aclu.org/secure/ca-hunger-strike?emsrc=Nat_Appeal_AutologinEnabled&emissue=criminal_justice&emtype=petition&ms=eml_130719_acluaction_cahungerstrike&af=k%2FxKX1cIRdoonPVmvnAfAit8jzOCulLOnCX4AAFljff%2B%2BVOdOHNe6CKwl7glWQSjSakzXt53zF%2FodPf00T3rRHlglO3tjEA6DcMSLJRlTbfVBHAizX6uOxoSy5%2FbP93EBFj5xi6Lwm3RWHjmDOZDARHLBSl1rqTr07kLhONZrnU1UIIgPs0P%2FXQ%2BJL3reyE8%2BoiI1nlfPZPBVhbfYxUzMQ%3D%3D&etname=130719+CA+prisoners+hunger+strike&etjid=946739
In
California, hundreds of prisoners have been held in solitary for more
than a decade – some for infractions as trivial as reading Machiavelli's
"The Prince."

Gabriel Reyes describes the pain of being isolated for at least 22 hours a day for the last 16 years:

“Unless
you have lived it, you cannot imagine what it feels like to be by
yourself, between four cold walls, with little concept of time…. It is a
living tomb …’ I have not been allowed physical contact with any of my
loved ones since 1995…I feel helpless and hopeless. In short, I am being
psychologically tortured.”

That’s why over 30,000
prisoners in California began a hunger strike – the biggest the state
has ever seen. They’re refusing food to protest prisoners being held for
decades in solitary and to push for other changes to improve their
basic conditions.

California Corrections Secretary
Jeffrey Beard has tried to dismiss the strikers and refuses to
negotiate, but the media pressure is building through the strike. If
tens of thousands of us take action, we can help keep this issue in the
spotlight so that Secretary Beard can’t ignore the inhumane treatment of
prisoners.

Sign the petition urging Corrections Secretary Beard to end the use of long-term solitary confinement.

Solitary
is such an extreme form of punishment that a United Nations torture
rapporteur called for an international ban on the practice except in
rare occasions. Here’s why:

The majority of the 80,000
people held in solitary in this country are severely mentally ill or
because of a minor infraction (it’s a myth that it’s only for violent
prisoners)
Even for people with stable mental health, solitary
causes severe psychological reactions, often leading people to attempt
suicide
It jeopardizes public safety because prisoners held in solitary have a harder time reintegrating into society.

And
to add insult to injury, the hunger strikers are now facing retaliation
– their lawyers are being restricted from visiting and the strikers are
being punished. But the media continues to write about the hunger
strike and we can help keep the pressure on Secretary Beard by signing
this petition.

Sign the petition urging Corrections Secretary Beard to end the use of long-term solitary confinement.

Our
criminal justice system should keep communities safe and treat people
fairly. The use of solitary confinement undermines both of these goals –
but little by little, we can help put a stop to such cruelty.

Thank you,
Anthony for the ACLU Action team
P.S.
The hunger strikers have developed five core demands to address their
basic conditions, the main one being an end to long-term solitary
confinement. They are:

The
statement was read by Pfc. Bradley Manning at a providence inquiry for
his formal plea of guilty to one specification as charged and nine
specifications for lesser included offenses. He pled not guilty to 12
other specifications. This rush transcript was taken by journalist Alexa
O'Brien at Thursday's pretrial hearing and first appeared on Salon.com.

You Have the Right to Remain Silent: NLG Guide to Law Enforcement Encounters

Posted 1 day ago on July 27, 2012, 10:28 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Occupy
Wall Street is a nonviolent movement for social and economic justice,
but in recent days disturbing reports have emerged of Occupy-affiliated
activists being targeted by US law enforcement, including agents from
the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. To help ensure Occupiers
and allied activists know their rights when encountering law
enforcement, we are publishing in full the National Lawyers Guild's
booklet: You Have the Right to Remain Silent. The NLG provides
invaluable support to the Occupy movement and other activists – please
click here to support the NLG.

We strongly encourage
all Occupiers to read and share the information provided below. We also
recommend you enter the NLG's national hotline number (888-654-3265)
into your cellphone (if you have one) and keep a copy handy. This
information is not a substitute for legal advice. You should contact the
NLG or a criminal defense attorney immediately if you have been visited
by the FBI or other law enforcement officials. You should also alert
your relatives, friends, co-workers and others so that they will be
prepared if they are contacted as well.

You Have the Right to Remain Silent: A Know Your Rights Guide for Law Enforcement Encounters

What Rights Do I Have?

Whether
or not you're a citizen, you have rights under the United States
Constitution. The Fifth Amendment gives every person the right to remain
silent: not to answer questions asked by a police officer or government
agent. The Fourth Amendment restricts the government's power to enter
and search your home or workplace, although there are many exceptions
and new laws have expanded the government's power to conduct
surveillance. The First Amendment protects your right to speak freely
and to advocate for social change. However, if you are a non-citizen,
the Department of Homeland Security may target you based on your
political activities.

Standing Up For Free Speech

The
government's crusade against politically-active individuals is intended
to disrupt and suppress the exercise of time-honored free speech
activities, such as boycotts, protests, grassroots organizing and
solidarity work. Remember that you have the right to stand up to the
intimidation tactics of FBI agents and other law enforcement officials
who, with political motives, are targeting organizing and free speech
activities. Informed resistance to these tactics and steadfast defense
of your and others' rights can bring positive results. Each person who
takes a courageous stand makes future resistance to government
oppression easier for all. The National Lawyers Guild has a long
tradition of standing up to government repression. The organization
itself was labeled a "subversive" group during the McCarthy Era and was
subject to FBI surveillance and infiltration for many years. Guild
attorneys have defended FBI-targeted members of the Black Panther Party,
the American Indian Movement, and the Puerto Rican independence
movement. The NLG exposed FBI surveillance, infiltration and disruption
tactics that were detailed during the 1975-76 COINTELPRO hearings. In
1989 the NLG prevailed in a lawsuit on behalf of several activist
organizations, including the Guild, that forced the FBI to expose the
extent to which it had been spying on activist movements. Under the
settlement, the FBI turned over roughly 400,000 pages of its files on
the Guild, which are now available at the Tamiment Library at New York
University.

What if FBI Agents or Police Contact Me?

What if an agent or police officer comes to the door?

Do
not invite the agents or police into your home. Do not answer any
questions. Tell the agent that you do not wish to talk with him or her.
You can state that your lawyer will contact them on your behalf. You can
do this by stepping outside and pulling the door behind you so that the
interior of your home or office is not visible, getting their contact
information or business cards and then returning inside. They should
cease questioning after this. If the agent or officer gives a reason for
contacting you, take notes and give the information to your attorney.
Anything you say, no matter how seemingly harmless or insignificant, may
be used against you or others in the future. Lying to or misleading a
federal agent is a crime. The more you speak, the more opportunity for
federal law enforcement to find something you said (even if not
intentionally) false and assert that you lied to a federal officer.

Do I have to answer questions?

You
have the constitutional right to remain silent. It is not a crime to
refuse to answer questions. You do not have to talk to anyone, even if
you have been arrested or are in jail. You should affirmatively and
unambiguously state that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to
consult an attorney. Once you make the request to speak to a lawyer, do
not say anything else. The Supreme Court recently ruled that answering
law enforcement questions may be taken as a waiver of your right to
remain silent, so it is important that you assert your rights and
maintain them. Only a judge can order you to answer questions. There is
one exception: some states have "stop and identify" statutes which
require you to provide identity information or your name if you have
been detained on reasonable suspicion that you may have committed a
crime. A lawyer in your state can advise you of the status of these
requirements where you reside.

Do I have to give my name?

As
above, in some states you can be detained or arrested for merely
refusing to give your name. And in any state, police do not always
follow the law, and refusing to give your name may make them suspicious
or more hostile and lead to your arrest, even without just cause, so use
your judgment. Giving a false name could in some circumstances be a
crime.

Do I need a lawyer?

You have
the right to talk to a lawyer before you decide whether to answer
questions from law enforcement. It is a good idea to talk to a lawyer if
you are considering answering any questions. You have the right to have
a lawyer present during any interview. The lawyer's job is to protect
your rights. Once you tell the agent that you want to talk to a lawyer,
he or she should stop trying to question you and should make any further
contact through your lawyer. If you do not have a lawyer, you can still
tell the officer you want to speak to one before answering questions.
Remember to get the name, agency and telephone number of any
investigator who visits you, and give that information to your lawyer.
The government does not have to provide you with a free lawyer unless
you are charged with a crime, but the NLG or another organization may be
able to help you find a lawyer for free or at a reduced rate.

If I refuse to answer questions or say I want a lawyer, won't it seem like I have something to hide?

Anything
you say to law enforcement can be used against you and others. You can
never tell how a seemingly harmless bit of information might be used or
manipulated to hurt you or someone else. That is why the right not to
talk is a fundamental right under the Constitution. Keep in mind that
although law enforcement agents are allowed to lie to you, lying to a
government agent is a crime. Remaining silent is not. The safest things
to say are "I am going to remain silent," "I want to speak to my
lawyer," and "I do not consent to a search." It is a common practice for
law enforcement agents to try to get you to waive your rights by
telling you that if you have nothing to hide you would talk or that
talking would "just clear things up." The fact is, if they are
questioning you, they are looking to incriminate you or someone you may
know, or they are engaged in political intelligence gathering. You
should feel comfortable standing firm in protection and defense of your
rights and refusing to answer questions.

Can agents search my home or office?

You
do not have to let police or agents into your home or office unless
they have and produce a valid search warrant. A search warrant is a
written court order that allows the police to conduct a specified
search. Interfering with a warrantless search probably will not stop it
and you might get arrested. But you should say "I do not consent to a
search," and call a criminal defense lawyer or the NLG. You should be
aware that a roommate or guest can legally consent to a search of your
house if the police believe that person has the authority to give
consent, and your employer can consent to a search of your workspace
without your permission.

What if agents have a search warrant?

If
you are present when agents come for the search, you can ask to see the
warrant. The warrant must specify in detail the places to be searched
and the people or things to be taken away. Tell the agents you do not
consent to the search so that they cannot go beyond what the warrant
authorizes. Ask if you are allowed to watch the search; if you are
allowed to, you should. Take notes, including names, badge numbers, what
agency each officer is from, where they searched and what they took. If
others are present, have them act as witnesses to watch carefully what
is happening. If the agents ask you to give them documents, your
computer, or anything else, look to see if the item is listed in the
warrant. If it is not, do not consent to them taking it without talking
to a lawyer. You do not have to answer questions. Talk to a lawyer
first. (Note: If agents present an arrest warrant, they may only perform
a cursory visual search of the premises to see if the person named in
the arrest warrant is present.)

Do I have to answer questions if I have been arrested?

No.
If you are arrested, you do not have to answer any questions. You
should affirmatively and unambiguously state that you wish to assert
your right to remain silent. Ask for a lawyer right away. Do not say
anything else. Repeat to every officer who tries to talk to or question
you that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to speak to a
lawyer. You should always talk to a lawyer before you decide to answer
any questions.

What if I speak to government agents anyway?

Even
if you have already answered some questions, you can refuse to answer
other questions until you have a lawyer. If you find yourself talking,
stop. Assert that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to speak
to a lawyer.

What if the police stop me on the street?

Ask
if you are free to go. If the answer is yes, consider just walking
away. If the police say you are not under arrest, but are not free to
go, then you are being detained. The police can pat down the outside of
your clothing if they have reason to suspect you might be armed and
dangerous. If they search any more than this, say clearly, "I do not
consent to a search." They may keep searching anyway. If this happens,
do not resist because you can be charged with assault or resisting
arrest. You do not have to answer any questions. You do not have to open
bags or any closed container. Tell the officers you do not consent to a
search of your bags or other property.

What if police or agents stop me in my car?

Keep
your hands where the police can see them. If you are driving a vehicle,
you must show your license, registration and, in some states, proof of
insurance. You do not have to consent to a search. But the police may
have legal grounds to search your car anyway. Clearly state that you do
not consent. Officers may separate passengers and drivers from each
other to question them, but no one has to answer any questions.

What if I am treated badly by the police or the FBI?

Write
down the officer's badge number, name or other identifying information.
You have a right to ask the officer for this information. Try to find
witnesses and their names and phone numbers. If you are injured, seek
medical attention and take pictures of the injuries as soon as you can.
Call a lawyer as soon as possible.

What if the police or FBI threaten me with a grand jury subpoena if I don't answer their questions?

A
grand jury subpoena is a written order for you to go to court and
testify about information you may have. It is common for the FBI to
threaten you with a subpoena to get you to talk to them. If they are
going to subpoena you, they will do so anyway. You should not volunteer
to speak just because you are threatened with a subpoena. You should
consult a lawyer.

What if I receive a grand jury subpoena?

Grand
jury proceedings are not the same as testifying at an open court trial.
You are not allowed to have a lawyer present (although one may wait in
the hallway and you may ask to consult with him or her after each
question) and you may be asked to answer questions about your activities
and associations. Because of the witness's limited rights in this
situation, the government has frequently used grand jury subpoenas to
gather information about activists and political organizations. It is
common for the FBI to threaten activists with a subpoena in order to
elicit information about their political views and activities and those
of their associates. There are legal grounds for stopping ("quashing")
subpoenas, and receiving one does not necessarily mean that you are
suspected of a crime. If you do receive a subpoena, call the NLG
National Hotline at 888-NLG-ECOL (888-654-3265) or call a criminal
defense attorney immediately.

The government regularly
uses grand jury subpoena power to investigate and seek evidence related
to politically-active individuals and social movements. This practice is
aimed at prosecuting activists and, through intimidation and
disruption, discouraging continued activism.

Federal
grand jury subpoenas are served in person. If you receive one, it is
critically important that you retain the services of an attorney,
preferably one who understands your goals and, if applicable,
understands the nature of your political work, and has experience with
these issues. Most lawyers are trained to provide the best legal defense
for their client, often at the expense of others. Beware lawyers who
summarily advise you to cooperate with grand juries, testify against
friends, or cut off contact with your friends and political activists.
Cooperation usually leads to others being subpoenaed and investigated.
You also run the risk of being charged with perjury, a felony, should
you omit any pertinent information or should there be inconsistencies in
your testimony.

Frequently prosecutors will offer "use
immunity," meaning that the prosecutor is prohibited from using your
testimony or any leads from it to bring charges against you. If a
subsequent prosecution is brought, the prosecutor bears the burden of
proving that all of its evidence was obtained independent of the
immunized testimony. You should be aware, however, that they will use
anything you say to manipulate associates into sharing more information
about you by suggesting that you have betrayed confidences.

In
front of a grand jury you can "take the Fifth" (exercise your right to
remain silent). However, the prosecutor may impose immunity on you,
which strips you of Fifth Amendment protection and subjects you to the
possibility of being cited for contempt and jailed if you refuse to
answer further. In front of a grand jury you have no Sixth Amendment
right to counsel, although you can consult with a lawyer outside the
grand jury room after each question.

What if I don't cooperate with the grand jury?

If
you receive a grand jury subpoena and elect to not cooperate, you may
be held in civil contempt. There is a chance that you may be jailed or
imprisoned for the length of the grand jury in an effort to coerce you
to cooperate. Regular grand juries sit for a basic term of 18 months,
which can be extended up to a total of 24 months. It is lawful to hold
you in order to coerce your cooperation, but unlawful to hold you as a
means of punishment. In rare instances you may face criminal contempt
charges.

What If I Am Not a Citizen and the DHS Contacts Me?

The
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is now part of the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and has been renamed and
reorganized into: 1. The Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services
(BCIS); 2. The Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP); and 3. The
Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). All three bureaus
will be referred to as DHS for the purposes of this pamphlet.

?
Assert your rights. If you do not demand your rights or if you sign
papers waiving your rights, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
may deport you before you see a lawyer or an immigration judge. Never
sign anything without reading, understanding and knowing the
consequences of signing it.

? Talk to a lawyer. If
possible, carry with you the name and telephone number of an immigration
lawyer who will take your calls. The immigration laws are hard to
understand and there have been many recent changes. DHS will not explain
your options to you. As soon as you encounter a DHS agent, call your
attorney. If you can't do it right away, keep trying. Always talk to an
immigration lawyer before leaving the U.S. Even some legal permanent
residents can be barred from returning.

Based on
today's laws, regulations and DHS guidelines, non-citizens usually have
the following rights, no matter what their immigration status. This
information may change, so it is important to contact a lawyer. The
following rights apply to non-citizens who are inside the U.S.
Non-citizens at the border who are trying to enter the U.S. do not have
all the same rights.

Do I have the right to talk to a lawyer before answering any DHS questions or signing any DHS papers?

Yes.
You have the right to call a lawyer or your family if you are detained,
and you have the right to be visited by a lawyer in detention. You have
the right to have your attorney with you at any hearing before an
immigration judge. You do not have the right to a government-appointed
attorney for immigration proceedings, but if you have been arrested,
immigration officials must show you a list of free or low cost legal
service providers.

Should I carry my green card or other immigration papers with me?

If
you have documents authorizing you to stay in the U.S., you must carry
them with you. Presenting false or expired papers to DHS may lead to
deportation or criminal prosecution. An unexpired green card, I-94,
Employment Authorization Card, Border Crossing Card or other papers that
prove you are in legal status will satisfy this requirement. If you do
not carry these papers with you, you could be charged with a crime.
Always keep a copy of your immigration papers with a trusted family
member or friend who can fax them to you, if need be. Check with your
immigration lawyer about your specific case.

Am I required to talk to government officers about my immigration history?

If
you are undocumented, out of status, a legal permanent resident (green
card holder), or a citizen, you do not have to answer any questions
about your immigration history. (You may want to consider giving your
name; see above for more information about this.) If you are not in any
of these categories, and you are being questioned by a DHS or FBI agent,
then you may create problems with your immigration status if you refuse
to provide information requested by the agent. If you have a lawyer,
you can tell the agent that your lawyer will answer questions on your
behalf. If answering questions could lead the agent to information that
connects you with criminal activity, you should consider refusing to
talk to the agent at all.

If I am arrested for
immigration violations, do I have the right to a hearing before an
immigration judge to defend myself against deportation charges?

Yes.
In most cases only an immigration judge can order you deported. But if
you waive your rights or take "voluntary departure," agreeing to leave
the country, you could be deported without a hearing. If you have
criminal convictions, were arrested at the border, came to the U.S.
through the visa waiver program or have been ordered deported in the
past, you could be deported without a hearing. Contact a lawyer
immediately to see if there is any relief for you.

Can I call my consulate if I am arrested?

Yes.
Non-citizens arrested in the U.S. have the right to call their
consulate or to have the police tell the consulate of your arrest. The
police must let your consulate visit or speak with you if consular
officials decide to do so. Your consulate might help you find a lawyer
or offer other help. You also have the right to refuse help from your
consulate.

What happens if I give up my right to a hearing or leave the U.S. before the hearing is over?

You
could lose your eligibility for certain immigration benefits, and you
could be barred from returning to the U.S. for a number of years. You
should always talk to an immigration lawyer before you decide to give up
your right to a hearing.

What should I do if I want to contact DHS?

Always
talk to a lawyer before contacting DHS, even on the phone. Many DHS
officers view "enforcement" as their primary job and will not explain
all of your options to you.

What Are My Rights at Airports?

IMPORTANT
NOTE: It is illegal for law enforcement to perform any stops, searches,
detentions or removals based solely on your race, national origin,
religion, sex or ethnicity.

If I am entering the U.S. with valid travel papers can a U.S. customs agent stop and search me?

Yes. Customs agents have the right to stop, detain and search every person and item.

Can
my bags or I be searched after going through metal detectors with no
problem or after security sees that my bags do not contain a weapon?

Yes.
Even if the initial screen of your bags reveals nothing suspicious, the
screeners have the authority to conduct a further search of you or your
bags.

If I am on an airplane, can an airline employee interrogate me or ask me to get off the plane?

The
pilot of an airplane has the right to refuse to fly a passenger if he
or she believes the passenger is a threat to the safety of the flight.
The pilot's decision must be reasonable and based on observations of
you, not stereotypes.

What If I Am Under 18?

Do I have to answer questions?

No.
Minors too have the right to remain silent. You cannot be arrested for
refusing to talk to the police, probation officers, or school officials,
except in some states you may have to give your name if you have been
detained.

What if I am detained?

If
you are detained at a community detention facility or Juvenile Hall, you
normally must be released to a parent or guardian. If charges are filed
against you, in most states you are entitled to counsel (just like an
adult) at no cost.

Do I have the right to express political views at school?

Public
school students generally have a First Amendment right to politically
organize at school by passing out leaflets, holding meetings, etc., as
long as those activities are not disruptive and do not violate
legitimate school rules. You may not be singled out based on your
politics, ethnicity or religion.

Can my backpack or locker be searched?

School
officials can search students' backpacks and lockers without a warrant
if they reasonably suspect that you are involved in criminal activity or
carrying drugs or weapons. Do not consent to the police or school
officials searching your property, but do not physically resist or you
may face criminal charges.

Disclaimer

This
booklet is not a substitute for legal advice. You should contact an
attorney if you have been visited by the FBI or other law enforcement
officials. You should also alert your relatives, friends, co-workers and
others so that they will be prepared if they are contacted as well.

On Gun Control, Martin Luther King, the Deacons of Defense and the history of Black Liberation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzYKisvBN1o&feature=player_embedded

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Fukushima Never Again

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU-Z4VLDGxU

"Fukushima,
Never Again" tells the story of the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdowns
in north east Japan in March of 2011 and exposes the cover-up by Tepco
and the Japanese government.

This is the first film
that interviews the Mothers Of Fukushima, nuclear power experts and
trade unionists who are fighting for justice and the protection of the
children and the people of Japan and the world. The residents and
citizens were forced to buy their own geiger counters and radiation
dosimeters in order to test their communities to find out if they were
in danger.

The government said contaminated soil in children's school grounds was safe and then

when
the people found out it was contaminated and removed the top soil, the
government and TEPCO refused to remove it from the school grounds.

It
also relays how the nuclear energy program for "peaceful atoms" was
brought to Japan under the auspices of the US military occupation and
also the criminal cover-up of the safety dangers of the plant by TEPCO
and GE management which built the plant in Fukushima. It also interviews
Kei Sugaoka, the GE nulcear plant inspector from the bay area who
exposed cover-ups in the safety at the Fukushima plant and was
retaliated against by GE. This documentary allows the voices of the
people and workers to speak out about the reality of the disaster and
what this means not only for the people of Japan but the people of the
world as the US government and nuclear industry continue to push for
more new plants and government subsidies. This film breaks

the information blockade story line of the corporate media in Japan, the US and around the world that Fukushima is over.

Production Of Labor Video Project

P.O. Box 720027

San Francisco, CA 94172

www.laborvideo.org

lvpsf@laborvideo.org

For information on obtaining the video go to:

www.fukushimaneveragain.com

(415)282-1908

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1000 year of war through the world

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiG8neU4_bs&feature=share

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Anatomy of a Massacre - Afganistan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6BnRc11aug&feature=player_embedded

Afghans accuse multiple soldiers of pre-meditated murder

To see more go to http://www.youtube.com/user/journeymanpictures

Follow us on Facebook (http://goo.gl/YRw42) or Twitter

(http://www.twitter.com/journeymanvod)

The recent massacre of 17 civilians by a rogue US soldier has been shrouded in

mystery. But through unprecedented access to those involved, this report

confronts the accusations that Bales didn't act alone.

"They came into my room and they killed my family". Stories like this are common

amongst the survivors in Aklozai and Najiban. As are the shocking accusations

that Sergeant Bales was not acting alone. Even President Karzai has announced

"one man can not do that". Chief investigator, General Karimi, is suspicious

that despite being fully armed, Bales freely left his base without raising

alarm. "How come he leaves at night and nobody is aware? Every time we have

weapon accountability and personal accountability." These are just a few of the

questions the American army and government are yet to answer. One thing however

is very clear, the massacre has unleashed a wave of grief and outrage which

means relations in Kandahar will be tense for years to come: "If I could lay my

hands on those infidels, I would rip them apart with my bare hands."

A Film By SBS

Distributed By Journeyman Pictures

April 2012

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Photo of George Zimmerman, in 2005 photo, left, and in a more recent photo.